Madzmerized

February is arts month, or so a billboard reminded at an LRT station I pass through en route to office. It’s also Pasinaya’s month – CCP’s one-day festival where for a suggested minimum contribution of 20 pesos, one could preview the resident companies’ 2011 offerings. Other performance groups get to show their stuff in different spaces of CCP as well. For resident companies, they have Abelardo, the Main Theater.

This year, BFF Eon and I availed of Fast Pass, a 100-peso “priority access” to the theaters, the main benefit of which was not having to invest much patience and perseverance in the long queues at the Main Theater. Each resident company’s preview show runs for less than an hour; after every performance, the audience will have to leave the theater and line up at the side entrances again for the next show.

Last year Eon and I, while waiting in line for the preview of the Philippine Madrigal Singers, we chatted with one of the ushers who controlled the north side entrance of the Main Theater. The crowd, she said, was always thickest and hardest to control for the Madrigal Singers, superstar resident company. This year was no different – though, IMHO overall I think the attendance to this year’s Pasinaya was much, much more. Or I’m just older and tired.

Before the Madz, sometime in the middle of the day, I was already feeling weary and regretful for sacrificing peace, quiet and all-around laziness of Sunday for culture’s version of Midnight Madness Sale. Indeed I thought, Pasinaya has discounted value after factoring in mobs of youngsters only probably there to comply with some school requirement like reaction papers. But I’m not sure if Eon shares the same sentiment – in between gyroscopic head oscillations, he confessed that one thing he hated about Pasinaya was the bounty of boyhoods, one after another, kept on leaving him heartbroken. I forgot what I promised myself after last year’s Pasinaya – not to attend this ever again.

After seeing the Madz, I forgot all weariness and regret. A few minutes of seeing them in their calm, composed madrigal seating, listening to their voices both distinct and harmonious, and feeling the emotions conveyed by their pieces dissolved all madness of the crowd that went with us for that preview. Music does soothe the beast in men. I never thought much of the song “How Did You Know” until the Madz performed it: I realized how the song when sung should feel, and I had a tearful. Drama queen Eon was in varying degrees of modest sniffling and bawling. Even that nameless girl seated across the aisle, whom I sneered at earlier for making lipstick and mascara performance art, just wasted her day’s worth of cosmetics.

The Philippine Madrigal Singers are certainly worth much, much more than the 100 pesos I paid. I thought – and eventually tweeted – that each song they sung was worth 100 pesos. The earlier disappointments were even absolved – an orchestra that needed more symphony, ballet that needed more ensemble, a musical that felt like a Palawan 2 curtain call. As in last years, thank goodness for the Madz, the one-day chaos of Pasinaya 2011 was in the end worth the effort.